It’s been a long time since Catholic high school taught me Latin, but one phrase comes to mind when considering Brockville’s new integrity commissioner: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”

Who watches the watchmen?

I refer not to the proposed integrity commissioners themselves, who apparently have a respectable store of experience in municipal affairs, but of the watchmen and women who will guard the gates, as it were, through which integrity complaints must pass.

To be fair, it’s a question that appears to be on the minds of folks at city hall as well.

On Tuesday, council’s finance and administration committee recommended the full council appoint Kingston-based Cunningham, Swan, Carty, Little and Bonham LLP as Brockville’s integrity commissioner. The full council is expected to OK the move next Tuesday.

It’s largely a housekeeping matter, since new provincial rules require municipalities to appoint an integrity commissioner by March 1.

The new rules, part of amendments to the Municipal Act, also require council to have a code of conduct, something that is also being prepared at city hall.

Earlier this week, Mayor Jason Baker said members of the public should be confident there will be a clear set of guidelines and a process to follow for all elected officials.

The integrity commissioner is an independent and impartial official who reports directly to city council on matters related to the application of the code of conduct for members of council and local boards.

There will not be an annual retainer for the services, but the city will pay Cunningham Swan members an hourly rate as needed. The company’s lead on the Brockville file, Tony Fleming, will get $295 an hour for integrity commissioner services, while hourly rates for other Cunningham Swan employees will range from $150 to $295.

Finance committee members chose not to allocate a budget amount for the integrity commissioner, because everyone around the table agreed it’s impossible to predict how much the service will cost.

The number of complaints will vary from year to year and, as Baker noted, when a member of the public files a complaint, the meter starts ticking, unbeknownst to council.

And here begins the conundrum. In order to prevent city hall from being flooded with expensively frivolous complaints, some mechanism is needed to determine whether any given complaint is valid.

In Brockville, complaints to the integrity commissioner will be reviewed by a three-person committee made up of the mayor, city clerk Sandra MacDonald and the city manager (Maureen Pascoe Merkley now fills that role on an interim basis until the city hires a permanent top administrator).

These three are the watchpeople who guard the gates, and the question thus arises: How does the mayor, hypothetically, decide on the merits of a complaint directed at him?

MacDonald acknowledged that’s a question city hall is pondering, and officials hope to get some guidance from Cunningham Swan once the motion to hire the firm is adopted.

One solution might be to designate whoever is acting mayor at the time of said hypothetical complaint to sit in the mayor’s place to adjudicate the matter.

But that is also an imperfect solution. Council members are linked to each other and to the mayor in many subtle ways, personal, professional and political, with associations and alliances that shift with each passing issue. It’s not impossible that a particular complaint against the mayor might relate, at least tangentially, to whichever councillor is acting mayor that month.

For that matter, someone’s beef about a councillor might tangentially relate to the mayor who has to decide whether it goes forward.

Meanwhile, if we leave the final decision to the firm hired to be the integrity commissioner, it will be in a position to decide whether or not it should take up an opportunity to bill city hall.

We’ll have to wait and see how Cunnningham Swan suggests city hall can square this circle, with examples, no doubt, of how this is done in other communities.

But here’s one possible made-in-Brockville solution: Mayor Baker has already tweaked the standing committee system to include citizen appointees, so why not appoint a panel of citizens to adjudicate these complaints?

There will never be a perfectly impartial solution, but that’s one answer.

City hall reporter Ronald Zajac can be reached at Rzajac@postmedia.com.